A San Antonio lab says primate research is necessary for curing diseases like AIDS and hepatitis. But what progress has really been made.

According to Pippin's review of those 12 chimps' necropsy reports, a chimp named Phoebe was euthanized at age 40 "due to lost appetite, weight loss, poor functional status and marked progression of renal failure." She was found to have "progressive renal failure due to diabetes."

Guy was 51 when he was found dead in his den late in the morning of February 3, 2011. Likely cause: Sudden cardiac death.

Candi's heart gave out at age 25 following the "extraction of several broken teeth." No specific cause of death was identified, but Candi was epileptic and had an enlarged liver and pituitary gland.

photo courtesy of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Ken was one of 14 lab chimps called out of retirement and sent to the Southwest National Primate Research Center.

Mark Graham

Dr. John Pippin of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine believes the future of AIDS research is in human subjects.

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Although Ken has outlived some of his peers, there is a strong chance that, given his poor health, he won't make it out of his thirties.

In April 2010, before Ken was sent to Southwest, the veterinary staff at the Air Force base wrote that although he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, "Ken's condition is stable. He is being provided with supportive care, his conditions are medically managed and he is being intensively monitored. However, none of these treatments are curative and acute decompensation may occur."

According to the vets, Ken's heart disease ensured a "grave prognosis." That's why the vets issued a do-not-resuscitate order. In the event that Ken's heart gives out, the vets recommended, the most humane thing to do would be to let him die.

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This is truly a tragedy. Testing on primates should be banned and made illegal everywhere. These primates should be released to caring animal sanctuarys that can provide a much needed change of lifestyle for these beautiful and intelligent animals, they have suffered for far too long.

Hey people! Don't be upset by this story. THE HOUSTON PRESS is known for FAUX NEWS regarding animal abuse. They did a story a couple of years ago about someone who was slashing cats then letting them out near where they were abducted, so the owners would find them dead. It was a horrible story. We called the numbers listed in the what turned out to be fictitious story and spoke to someone who was supposedly the animal investigator in charge. She said "wow, we got a lot of response to that story. I'll call you back." Of course she never did. We had informed her that a group of volunteers in the area were willing to go house to house asking if anyone had seen anything suspicious in the way of catnapping going on. After more investigating the details - turns out the story was BOGUS, just like this one.

That photo ... that gut-wrenching, heartbreaking photo. An innocent, condemned. Life in prison, sanctioned torture, all for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Future generations will look back appalled by what we are doing to these animals. Take a stand! Speak out! Take one minute out of your day to let others know what's going on.

Heaven help you if you catch a case of the hepatits, the primary symptom of which is terrible copy-editing.

How many decades will pass before we stop saying that torturing chimpanzees will cure AIDS in humans? This broken record-style approach to prevention, treatment, and a cure has gotten us nowhere, and people and animals have suffered because of it.

Chimpanzees, like all primates, are sensitive, intelligent beings. Beyond the torture and cruelty of being experimented on, they are confined to barren steel cages with no space to move naturally and no environmental enrichment. The testing that's really needed is on the lab workers who can do this to another living being: Where is their empathy?

Even if experiments on animals gave us useful information about human health -- which it doesn't* -- it's simply and unjustifiably cruel to cage thinking, feeling beings and torment them just because we can. After reading on PETA.org about the sickening ways in which primates are tortured and abused at SNPRC, Covance, Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories and other facilities, I will never support any business or charity that funds experiments on animals. It just wastes money, endangers human health, and inflicts physical and psychological agony on its terrified victims.

*Even small physical/genetic differences between species make it impossible to successfully apply results from other animals to humans. For example, no chimpanzee has ever developed AIDS from normal exposure to HIV, despite SNPRC's eagerness to use them for AIDS research. How many "miracle cures" in animals have you heard about that never materialized for humans? And how many drugs that passed animal testing later proved to harm or even kill patients? You can thank experiments on animals for those.